Mid-Size Ministering

Oct 5, 2003

Pedro Aspe, the former Mexican finance minister who resurrected the country's finances in the late 1980s, raises money for small- to medium-sized companies starved of capital.

Fresh from teaching a three-hour undergraduate finance class
that had begun at 7:00 a.m. at Mexico's prestigious ITAM
university, Pedro Aspe ducked into a car to be whisked off to
meet with a client on the outskirts of Mexico City. The former
finance minister keeps a rigorous schedule, squeezing in his
academic obligations at the crack of dawn so he can keep up
with his main job as a financier. The patrician Aspe served as
finance minister under President Carlos Salinas between 1988
and 1994 and is still respected for his role in resurrecting
Mexico's finances in the late 1980s. Aspe signed the world's
first Brady deal in 1991, which cemented Mexico's economic
resurgence and signaled the beginning of the end of the Latin
American debt crisis. But for the last eight years, Aspe has
run his own firm, Protego. The company does a bit of everything
- private equity investments,...